Are fancy pet foods worth it?

Tonight, thousands of Americans will sit down to a dinner of warmed-up leftovers or delivery pizza. Their dogs and cats, meanwhile, will feast like epicureans.

By WILLIAM GRIMESNYT News Service

Tonight, thousands of Americans will sit down to a dinner of warmed-up leftovers or delivery pizza. Their dogs and cats, meanwhile, will feast like epicureans, beneficiaries of a foodie revolution that has transformed many kitchens into four-star restaurants for pets.Cats who used to put up with plain tuna or mackerel can now savor white-tablecloth dishes like wild salmon and whipped egg souffle with garden greens, part of Fancy Feast’s Elegant Medleys line, or Outback Grill, an Australian-themed entree from Weruva, with native fish like barramundi and trevally.Their canine cousins might be sniffing lustily as the pop-top opens on French Country Cafe, a beguiling mixture of duck, brown rice, carrots, Golden Delicious apples and peas offered by Merrick, a small family-owned company in Amarillo, Texas, or sending their taste buds to Hawaii with Kauai Luau, chicken with brown rice, sweet potato, prawns, egg, garlic and kale in a lobster consomme. The beach feast is one of the Tiki Dog flavors from Petropics, another small company.In most U.S. homes, menus reflect belt-tightening. Mealtimes have lost some of their luster at the high table. Down on the kitchen floor, however, the picture is rosy.“It is now considered socially acceptable to treat pets as members of the family and to express that by spending lavishly on them, especially when it comes to food,” said David Lummis, the senior pet-industry analyst for Packaged Facts, a market research company.Joe Davison, a financial adviser in San Francisco who shops at Catnip + Bones, gave his two black Labradors a culinary upgrade about four years ago. They now dine on Cowboy Cookout and Grammy’s Pot Pie, two of the retro American flavors sold by Merrick.“The dogs love it, and I believe it helps with their health and coat, but I admit that it’s partly based on what looks good to me,” Davison said. “You can see green peas and pieces of potato along with the chunks of meat. It’s amazingly like real people food.”The new generation of chef-inspired pet foods accounts for no more than 5 percent of the pet-food market, but the market is big. Retail sales of dog and cat food exceeded $19 billion in 2011, according to the market research company Euromonitor International. Also, profit margins in what is sometimes called the super-premium category, a fuzzily defined niche that embraces natural, organic and gourmet pet foods, can reach 40 percent, compared with 30 percent for premium brands and 20 percent for standard brands.Pet owners, invariably called “pet parents” by the makers of super-premium pet foods, do not mind reaching in their wallets and paying extra, even in recessionary times.Two underlying forces have intensified the urge to spend: aging pets and a growing population of affluent pet owners spending money on them.The American Pet Products Association, an industry group, found in its most recent pet-owner study that about 4 in 10 American households own a cat and almost half own a dog. Increasingly, these pets are middle-aged or elderly. The most recent edition of the American Veterinary Medical Association’s “U.S. Pet Ownership and Demographics Sourcebook,” published in 2007, reported that about 4 in 10 of those cats and dogs were older than 6.At the same time, Packaged Facts has reported, households with incomes of more than $70,000 accounted for nearly half of total spending on pet food in 2010, up from less than a third in 2000. A new study of the pet industry by Dillon Media reports that those making more than $100,000 a year increased their share of pet-food spending and now account for about a third of the total market.These are precisely the health-conscious, label-scrutinizing, restaurant-going consumers likely to indulge their cats and dogs at mealtimes.“They might cut back on a new car or taking a trip around the world, but they won’t skimp on their pets,” said Tom Nieman, the owner of Fromm Family Foods, a fourth-generation family business in Mequon, Wis. “It’s not going to happen.”Some of the biggest winners in the super-premium race have been the mom-and-pop pet-food companies, both the established names like Fromm, Evanger and Merrick, as well as newcomers like Petropics, Blue Buffalo, Weruva and Petite Cuisine. Although no match for the likes of Purina, which controls about a third of the pet-food market, the boutique companies have registered strong growth, often in the double digits, over the past several years.All have benefited mightily from the great pet-food recall of 2007, when contaminated gluten and rice protein from China caused fatal kidney failure in thousands of cats and dogs around the world. The contaminated protein was found in pet food manufactured by Menu Foods, a Canadian company that supplied nearly 100 pet-food brands in the United States.Overnight, thousands of concerned pet owners shifted their allegiance to small companies with a brand identity built on using pure ingredients, often marketed as “human grade” and manufactured in plants that also produce canned food for humans. In some cases ingredients are packed by hand, with chunks and shreds layered for maximum eye appeal.“A lot of midline premium brands, which still have a lot of grain and carbohydrates in them, lost traction to companies like mine,” said Christine Hackett, who founded Petropics with her husband, Robert, in 2005 after working in research and development for PetCo.Reflecting a potent trend in restaurant dining, some pet-food companies have deliberately taken a detour around haute cuisine and tapped into nostalgia for blue-plate diner specials and comfort food — reinterpreted and updated. Merrick’s canned dog food includes all-American temptations like Burger Pies and Sweetie Fries, Campfire Trout Feast and Gameday Tailgate. Cats can go regional with New England Boil (whitefish, lobster, crab, shrimp and sardines) and Southern Delight, a down-home blend of chicken, catfish and crayfish.Weruva has introduced Cats in the Kitchen, a line of stewlike entrees with cutesy names like Pumpkin Jack Splash and Love Me Tender.Nothing is too good, when it comes down to it, for that standoffish, persnickety fur ball that rules the house. “You get a lot of delight in being able to plate something new and see the cat lick it clean,” said Hackett of Petropics. “And the cats do have the final vote.”

NEW YORK — If your dog turns up his nose at high-end prepared dog food — perhaps too effete for its taste — another foodie trend might be an option: raw food.It’s not that pets are dining on hamburger meat straight from the package, but rather on specially prepared foods like uncooked lamb livers and bison, and alfalfa sprouts and kale.Teresa Logan, a fashion stylist and doting owner of a 2 1/2-year-old Chihuahua-Pomeranian mix named Penny, recently switched her dog to a raw diet (chicken, rabbit or venison with mixed vegetables; carrot medallions and red peppers for snacks) after some digestive issues.BLogan said she’s been happy with the results.“Her coat looks good, her stomach is good, and she’s even slimmed down,” she said. “It’s like the difference between eating junk food and eating health food.”At dog runs around New York, many pet owners shared stories about how they’ve put their dogs on the diet.They include Sonya Wilcox, who switched Petey, her Boston terrier, to raw turkey and vegetables a year and a half ago to treat his “terrible dry, brittle coat” and severe allergies. Drea Peters, the founder of Curly Tail Pug Rescue, credits a diet of raw elk meat with saving the life of Chloe, her pug, who was suffering from seemingly untreatable allergies, lesions and tumors.Raw dog diets aren’t a new concept (many dogs were fed uncooked meat before kibble was introduced in the 1950s), but the raw foodist niche in the pet-care industry is a relatively recent development. And some veterinarians are skeptical.Dr. Ann Hohenhaus, a spokeswoman for the Animal Medical Center in Manhattan, said that she was not inclined to recommend a raw-food diet for her patients. “There are too many risks associated with it,” she said, among them sanitary issues (the food carries microbes that could harm either the pet or humans in the household) and the possibility that the diet is not nutritionally balanced.And while some dog owners make the argument that, in the wild, these animals would have eaten raw food, she pointed out: “Dogs have been domesticated and living with us for, some of them, centuries. A raw food diet is not necessarily going to agree with these animals whom we’ve imposed our lifestyles on.”Still, those who believe in the power of raw food are hard to dissuade.Geoff Bowers, founder of New Zealand-based K9 Natural, a line of raw dog food, suspects the burgeoning raw-pet-food market reflects the broader interest in healthful eating. “People are looking for more and more natural products,” he said, “and since pets are considered members of the family, they want healthier options for them, too.”Bowers, a former police-dog trainer, said he converted to raw feeding after studying Alaskan wolf packs, because he became convinced that “nature provides the perfect food” for dogs.Phil Klein, owner of the holistic pet-supply store Whiskers in New York, started selling raw food in 1988. Known to his fans as the Dogfather, Klein has published articles on the importance of feeding animals natural cuisine and keeps thick binders of thank-you notes from local pet owners who swear the raw diets he recommended cured their charges of everything from dandruff to diabetes.“Though pet owners using raw foods are still only maybe 2 or 3 percent of the total, the popularity of these diets is indicated by the fact that the big box stores like PetCo are latching on,” Klein said. “It’s become hip.”

Online Services

Original content available for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons license, except where noted.
Gadsden Times ~ 401 Locust St. Gadsden, AL 35901, Gadsden, AL 35901 ~ Privacy Policy ~ Terms Of Service